October 25, 2014

The Science of Fashion

In yesterday's post we looked at the science and fashion connection. The young designer interviewed in that feature, Ali Karami, mentioned the Arts@CERN Visiting Artists scheme as an initiative that would allow him to look deeper into his research in "Quantum Fashion". The Arts@CERN scheme is actually a very interesting project that encourages researches and projects that merge science with the art world.

Dutch Designer Iris van Herpen was for example invited to discover more about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) while visiting CERN, the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, a while back.

At the world's largest particle physics laboratory Van Herpen discovered the use of magnets: her visit included the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector with a 4 Tesla magnetic field that is 100,000 times stronger than the Earth's. The CMS actually became a source of inspiration for her Spring/Summer 2015 collection, entitled "Magnetic Motion" and showcased during the latest edition of Paris Fashion Week.

A hybrid mix of art, architecture, fashion and science, the collection was designed with the help of architects Philip Beesley and Niccolò Casas, and artist Jolan Van der Wiel, and featured intricate 3-D creations and structures; mesh veils that reinterpreted Beesley's geotextiles usually employed for engineering landscapes but used in this case to hint at new geographies of the body or fertile clothes that can grown on the wearer's body; and accessories such as necklaces and platform shoes that had been subjected to magnetic fields and looked as if the material they were made in had been frozen in alien-like formations.

While the collection certainly benefited from her 2014 ANDAM Fashion Award (250,000 euros and mentoring from Kering chairman and chief executive officer François-Henri Pinault) it obviously benefited even more from the designer's visit at the laboratories.

According to the Arts@CERN newsletter, van Herpen will go back to CERN next week for another specially curated visit to explore more and you can bet that this new experience will boost her imagination even further.

Yet there are further projects linking science and fashion, among them the Parallel Practices residencies: this pilot partnership project from the British Crafts Council and the Cultural Institute at King's College London, stimulates learning and research via collaborations between creative minds/makers and medical and scientific academics.

At the moment there are four Parallel Practices residencies: Richard Wingate, Principal Investigator at the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King's, and Celia Pym, textile maker, are bridging the gap between the concept of mending in anatomy and textile repair, and exploring notions of mending and repairing in the dissecting room.

Wingate and ceramist Tamsin van Essen are working on the concept of anatomy through a transformation process and through stages including digitisation, dissection, reassembly and display, with van Essen using clay to look at different material states and preparing experimental pieces, material trials, models, maquettes and tactile interactive objects.

Matthew Howard, lecturer in robotics at the Department of Informatics, and Karina Thompson, textile maker, are instead working towards digitally programmed embroidery and embroidered electrical connections for sensors. Stitched into garments, the latter will allow to measure and capture both movements of the wearer and the electrical impulses in the muscles causing the movement. Thomspon is also employing medical data as a starting point for her work.

Thrishantha Nanayakkara, principal investigator of the Laboratory for Morphological Computation and Learning, Les Bicknell, book artist, and Naomi Mcintosh, jeweller, are working on soft robotics through model-making and looking at ways of controlling movement and articulation of objects in order to build new structures.

Fashion-wise it looks like what we dreamt about on this site in 2010 with multiple posts about science and fashion (or about shooting fashion collections in underground scientific laboratories...) is not just turning into a possible reality, but it is showing that there are many benefits in sharing skills between different practices and professionals. Who knows, maybe one day fashion will become - thanks to science - a sort of "possibility space" where special experiments can be tried and where new hopes and dreams can be nurtured.